Books and Literature

January '08

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

The Silver Ghost: A Supernatural Car
By Jonathan Harley
Dalton Watson Fine Books
847-945-0568www.daltonwatson.com
$69
**
For more than a century, Rolls-Royce has been held to the highest standards of quality and prestige, and its 1907-1925 40/50hp Silver Ghosts, famous for their reliability, earned a reputation as the finest automobiles that money could buy.
Jonathan Harley, for 40 years one of the U.K.'s foremost Silver Ghost restoration specialists, has authored The Silver Ghost: A Supernatural Car as both a personal account, revealing how he came to specialize in the restoration of these cars, and a history, discussing their design and their relation to their contemporaries.
A largely personal tale, this title also features appendixes of the known surviving chassis numbers and his illustrations of crucial mechanical parts. If you're fascinated by these important Rolls-Royces, this is a good book for your shelf.
Mazda MX-5 Miata: Find it. Fix it. Trick it.
By Keith Tanner
Motorbooks
800-826-6600www.motorbooks.com
$25.95
***
Mazda's Miata was the first "frenzy" car of recent memory, and like the VW New Beetle and Chrysler's PT Cruiser, caused a major stir and garnered rave reviews. The original Miata, which debuted at $13,800 for 1990, was the archetypical roadster. Keith Tanner, an MX-5 Miata specialist, has written Mazda MX-5 Miata: Find it. Fix it. Trick it. to share his years of accumulated buying, maintaining and tuning knowledge.
This book covers all MX-5s up through 2005, and its 160 pages offer easy-to-follow DIY directions and plenty of representative color photography. A few minor printing errors were found in our review copy, but the information contained within more than made up for the minor inconvenience. Anyone who owns or is contemplating buying a Miata would do himself a service by picking up this book.

This article originally appeared in the January, 2008 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.